By Mary Wilke
In recent years, extremists in charge of New Hampshire’s Republican Party, with Gov. Chris Sununu’s blessing, have drastically cut state funding for public education, adopted the most expansive school voucher program in the country, taken steps to double the number of charter schools in the state, and found a variety of ways to steer public funds away from our local public schools to unaccountable, sometimes for-profit, often unlicensed private alternatives.
Now they’re using unfounded smears about public school teachers as another strategy to undermine our public education system — a system treasured by most Americans but disdained by those who no longer accept the idea of the “common good.”
In pushing the “banned concepts bill” last year, some politicians falsely accused teachers of deliberately making white students feel guilty for being white and of teaching a law school level theory about race that most of us, including teachers, had never heard of. Now they’re promoting the myth that our local teachers (picture them in your mind’s eye, please) are Marxist revolutionaries who spend their days indoctrinating our youth.
A new bill, the “Teacher Loyalty Act” (House Bill 1255), would forbid public school teachers from advocating “socialism, Marxism … or any other doctrine … which includes the overthrow by force” of our government, as if there were any reason to believe this is going on in our local schools. It also threatens teachers with loss of their livelihoods if they cross vaguely defined lines involving “negative accounts” of any aspect of U.S. history. The effect would be to chill class discussion of important topics, and the implication is that teachers can’t be trusted to teach our nation’s history honestly and fairly.
Hudson Republican Rep. Alicia Lekas said, as she introduced the bill in a legislative hearing, that its intent is to make sure teachers are educating and not indoctrinating. “It is one thing to try to teach religion and dive into conflicts that have happened as a result of it,” she said. “But if I were to try to persuade you that my religion is the right religion … that’s indoctrination.” (How ironic that Lekas chose religious indoctrination as her straw man. Just last year, she voted for the school voucher program that now sends millions of public dollars to religious schools, many of which openly teach that theirs is the one true religion. But HB 1255 wouldn’t apply to them.)
In answer to a direct question, Lekas couldn’t cite actual evidence of indoctrination in public schools, referring only to unnamed people complaining about unidentified schools. Other politicians also fall short. For instance, in response to testimony by a teachers’ union official about a different bill, House Majority Leader Jason Osborne, an Auburn Republican, proclaimed, “they want to indoctrinate our children in the same Marxist theories they hold.”
I wish these politicians had taken the Concord High history class my son took, where students learned the importance of backing up opinion with fact. In that class, students were asked to read several published essays about Thomas Jefferson — some praising him for his role in establishing our democracy, some criticizing him as an enslaver. Students analyzed each essay to identify the evidence the authors used to support their opinions and then assessed the quality of that evidence and the persuasiveness of the argument. Their final assignment was to write their own essays, taking a position about Jefferson (hero? not hero? mixed?) and justifying it with fact-based evidence.
This was a master class in writing and thinking critically — the opposite of indoctrination. However, I wonder if the teacher would teach it today, when any mention of facts suggesting that our Founding Fathers were less than perfect raises the specter of losing one’s teaching credentials.
Public school teachers are professionals who can and should be trusted to teach their locally adopted curriculum, not to push their personal political beliefs. Rest assured that if a maverick teacher actually tried to indoctrinate students, word would get out via the students themselves and/or the paraprofessionals, special ed teachers, guidance counselors, parent volunteers, and administrators who pop in and out of classrooms.
If you believe that strong public schools are the bedrock of our democracy and critical to vibrant communities, please let your legislators know. And in the fall, let’s throw out the right-wing extremists, along with those Republican lawmakers who are marching lockstep with them, and vote only for candidates who promise to support and strengthen our free, inclusive, and accountable public schools.
Mary Wilke is a retired public school teacher and lives in Concord.
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